Battlesaurus

 

Begin Reading

Table of Contents

About the Author

Copyright Page

 

Thank you for buying this

Farrar, Straus and Giroux ebook.

 

To receive special offers, bonus content,

and info on new releases and other great reads,

sign up for our newsletters.

 

Or visit us online at

us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

 

For email updates on the author, click
here
.

 

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way.
Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author's copyright, please notify the publisher at:
us.macmillanusa.com/piracy
.

 

For Kathleen, a wonderful lady and a very special friend

 

PROLOGUE

February 17, 1815

 

THE PRISONER OF ELBA

The letter arrives by boat.

It arrives at night on a small schooner that should not be traveling these waters in the darkness, but the urgency of the situation has been pressed on the captain and he has reluctantly agreed.

The letter arrives in a canvas sack with other mail, for other residents of the island, and is handed ashore by a ten-year-old ship's boy who knows nothing of the contents. The sack is passed to a shorehand, roused from sleep just a few minutes earlier and still bleary-eyed from the aftereffects of a half bottle of nut liquor. He likewise has no idea that simply by taking the letter, he is striking a flint that will set the world on fire.

Indeed the only person on the island with any idea of the contents of the letter stepped ashore from the schooner just moments earlier. A major of the Imperial Guard, Marc Thibault is a veteran of more than seventy campaigns, with an earring of gold and handsome sideburns. He is armed with a short saber and a flintlock pistol, and is an expert with both.

Few documents would warrant such an escort, and furthermore the major is not alone, but is accompanied by two trustworthy grenadiers, with matching earrings and sideburns, sound of heart, keen of eye, and well hardened in battle.

The ship has brought other provisions, perhaps to disguise the real purpose of its trip, and the three soldiers wait under the lamplights as these are loaded, along with the mail sack, into the back of the goods cart.

A rough-edged sign on the front of the harbormaster's office declares the name of the town: Cavo. In reality it is little more than a collection of ramshackle huts and trading posts, centered on a series of long wooden jetties. The jetties are old and sagging as if melted by the heat of the island's summers, although the true culprit is rot and decay. By day, dogs fight over scraps and old fishermen snore under awnings. Even the winter sun is fierce on Elba.

There are bigger, more modern wharves at the island's capital, Portoferraio, but the arrival of the schooner there, at this time of night, might have attracted the eyes of the king's men.

Once loaded, the goods cart sets off for the residence of the island's reluctant ruler. The three soldiers follow on mounts that the harbormaster has scrambled to provide.

The escape of the prisoner of Elba has begun.

The world is about to burst into flames.

 

Book One

THE COMING OF THE BEASTS

March 3–April 4, 1815

 

THE BOY WHO BRINGS THE BREAD

The boy who brings the bread is Willem Verheyen.

This is not true.

His name is Pieter Geerts, but neither he, nor his mother, nor anyone in the world has used that name in so long that it is just a distant reflection of a life that once was.

Willem was born on the first day of the first month of the new century. When he was just seven years old, he saved the life of a village girl from a bloodthirsty raptor.

There are many dangerous animals in the forests of Europe, wolves, bears, and boars among them. But these animals have learned to fear man and do not attack unless threatened. Only raptors—large, meat-eating saurs—regard man as prey. Of all the raptors, the largest and most terrifying is the firebird: a huge, vicious beast, feathered like a bird. When stretched to full height, it is almost as tall as a man. Few people have faced a firebird and survived. It can kill with its teeth, its talons, or the terrible claws on its strong hind legs. But seven-year-old Willem, alone, faced such a creature to save the girl's life. That is a secret he keeps to himself.

Today, eight years later, Willem will again face a firebird, but he does not know that yet.

Willem quietly opens the gate to the house of the village healer, Madame Gertruda.

The girl he saved, H
é
lo
ï
se, is sleeping in the garden. She uncoils herself at the base of a tree and hisses at Willem as he shuts the gate behind him. She is a scrawny thing with wild brambles of hair, wearing just a plain woolen smock despite the chill of the early spring air.

He steps warily. She once launched herself at him without provocation, scratching and biting, spilling his breads in the herb garden.

H
é
lo
ï
se does not attack. She crouches in the garden as he knocks on the door of the cottage. He waits. Madame Gertruda is old and slow.

It is his second-to-last delivery. Only the schoolmaster's house remains, then Willem will be free to go and practice his act for the f
ê
te.

The basket is mostly empty and so is his purse. Those who cannot afford their morning baguette get one anyway. Those who can pay will do so when they have money. Those who cannot are still human beings, according to his mother.

A cat emerges from the side of the house and curls around his legs, rubbing its face on his shins. Two nervous microsaurus skitter among the herbs of the garden. Madame Gertruda is a magnet for sick and homeless animals.

Shuffling footsteps sound behind the door. The moment it opens, H
é
lo
ï
se picks up the cat and slips past him, past the healer, into the house.

Madame Gertruda is old, far older than any other person he knows. Her face is ridged as if worms have nested under her skin. Her hair is thin and white.

She glares and spits at him as she opens the door. Madame Gertruda has good days and bad days. This is clearly a bad day. Last night was no better, if H
é
lo
ï
se was sleeping in the garden.

Madame Gertruda is Flemish, like Willem, a minority in the village. But her position in the village is secure. The villagers cannot live without their healer.

She offers no coin for the bread. She never does. But nor did she demand payment when Willem's mother brought him to her, blue in the face and gushing green phlegm. She asks for nothing, and wants for nothing.

He hands the healer a baguette.

“I do not want your filthy crust,” she says, in French. Some days she remembers that he speaks Flemish, but most days she forgets.

“Good morning, madame, and good morning also to the mademoiselle,” Willem replies.

H
é
lo
ï
se's face appears in a wisp of morning twilight dancing in the shadows inside the house. She snarls at him like a dog.

Madame Gertruda snatches the bread out of his hands and slams the door in his face.

Today is definitely a bad day.

Willem passes the church on his way to the schoolmaster's house, across the road from the schoolhouse in the far corner of the village.

The village is old. It is small, just a strip of stone cottages alongside the river with some newer, larger houses around a communal square. It is surrounded, to the south and east, by fields of rye, oats, and barley, from which the village derives most of its income. To the north and west march the tall, dense trees of the vast Sonian Forest.

The saur-fence that protects the village is also old, and in need of repair: a series of high wooden poles, crossbraced by diagonal supports with sharpened ends that protrude through the fence to discourage nosy or hungry raptors. In more than one place the fence sags where the supports have cracked or rotted and have not been replaced.

Outside the saur-fence, in the narrow strip that runs between the fence and the river, are long patches of lavender that, on humid spring days, waft a heady scent over the entire village.

Some say that lavender keeps saurs away, and that might be true, because there have been no raptor attacks in the village itself. But that might also be due to the fact that there are very few dangerous saurs left in Wallonia.

Jean and Fran
ç
ois are waiting by the gate of the schoolmaster's house. Cousins who look like brothers, with thick necks and arms from countless hours of cutting wood (Fran
ç
ois) or hammering in his father's smithy (Jean). Jean is the younger but larger of the two.

Fran
ç
ois looks as though he is ready for work, with a heavy ax across his shoulders, hooked with both arms. Jean carries a crossbow in a sling on his back. He made the crossbow himself, hammering the tempered steel of the spring on his father's anvil.

“You march to war?” Willem asks.

Jean laughs. “Of a sort.”

“We're hunting eggs for the f
ê
te,” Fran
ç
ois says.

“Saur eggs?”

“No, hens' eggs,” Jean says, placing his hand on the stock of his crossbow. “But we are ready lest we encounter any angry chickens.”

Willem laughs.

“Come with us,” Fran
ç
ois says.

“Pierre says there is a raptor nest by the waterfall,” Jean says.

“Maybe even a firebird,” Fran
ç
ois adds, with a gleam to his eye.